Grettis Saga Criticism - Essay

Robert J. Glendinning (essay date 1970)

SOURCE: “Grettis Saga and European Literature in the Late Middle Ages,” in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1970, pp. 49-61.

[In the following essay, Glendinning examines elements of the novella genre present in the Grettis Saga as well as motifs and devices it shares with the literature of continental Europe.]

During the second half of the 13th century, when the literature of continental Europe was beginning to move into the new intellectual constellation that was to become the Renaissance, the people of Iceland were still living in that brilliant period which saw the culmination of their mediaeval...

[In the following essay, Motz provides instances in which the main characternof the Grettis Saga, Grettir, conforms to patterns of the hero in myth, tradition, and ritual, with the result that his individuality is sublimated.]

Grettir Ásmundarson, one of the strongest men of his time, a victim of both ill luck and the tempestuousness of his character, lived almost all of his adult life as an outlaw and was slain according to the saga written about him, as a mortally sick man on the lonely island which had sheltered him and...

[In the following essay, Peters discusses the prevalence of hryggspenna, a type of combat wrestling, in the Grettis Saga.]

Two distinct forms of wrestling are employed in Grettis Saga, an older Nordic hryggspenna style against nonhuman adversaries, and a newer, exclusively Icelandic glíma against all human opponents.1 The hryggspenna style is decidedly a combat style whereas glíma is practiced as sport. A form of trouser wretling similar to that practiced...

Robert Cook (essay date 1989)

SOURCE: “Reading for Character in Grettis Saga,” in Sagas of the Icelanders: A Book of Essays, edited by John Tucker, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989, pp. 226-40.

[In the following essay, Cook demonstrates some ways of discerning and evaluating character in the Grettis Saga.]

The modern reader, brought up on novels and unused to the Sagas of Icelanders, will at first have a hard time. The sagas present a bewildering array of persons and events, names and details, often without highlighting what is important or pointing to connections or giving the reader any apparent basis for comprehension. The novice deserves some help, and in this essay I will offer some...

Magnús Fjalldal (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: “The Making of Heroes and Monsters,” in The Long Arm of Coincidence: The Frustrated Connection between Beowulf and Grettis Saga, University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 17-36.

[In the following excerpt, Fjalldal refutes critical assertions of relationship between the characters of the Grettis Saga with those of Beowulf,claiming that many comparatists have shown more evidence of imaginative speculation than of literary research.]

The purpose of this and of the next three chapters is to examine the basic ingredients of the five genetically related analogues that critics claim to have found in Grettis saga against the relevant sections of...